Over recent years more people have been arguing that philosophy must rediscover its historic mission to help us live better, more contented lives. The idea burst into the public consciousness with Alain de Botton’s 2000 TV series, Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness.
Its basic premise was spelled out on the back jacket of the accompanying book, The Consolations of Philosophy, in a quote by Epicurus: “Any philosopher’s argument which does not therapeutically treat human suffering is worthless,” it began, concluding that “there is no profit in philosophy when it doesn’t expel the sufferings of the mind.”
De Botton’s success helped boost the profile of philosophical counselling as a complement or alternative to psychotherapy. But despite its plausibility as a worthwhile enterprise, the number of people practising or receiving such therapy so far has remained stubbornly low and its purported benefits remain unproved. Therapeutic philosophy has arrived in the culture without embedding itself in it yet.
Now the diffuse practical philosophy movement will receive another boost with the publication this month of a new series of nine books, The Art of Living, from the hitherto firmly academic publisher Acumen. The mission statement of the series echoes the Epicurean manifesto of De Botton: “From Plato to Bertrand Russell philosophers have engaged audiences on matters of life and death. The Art of Living series aims to open up philosophy’s riches to a wider public once again.”
We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil. That’s why appeals to philosophy’s historic mission to help us live better are beside the point: both philosophy and society have changed.
Despite the nod to philosophy’s past, The Art of Living series recognises this. Its contemporary feel is most evident in its mix of the highbrow and the lowbrow, the serious and the trivial.
The books are all short, meeting the demands of today’s time-poor readers: a future volume on attention is clearly needed.
Most importantly, philosophy, like alcohol, can do us good, but it is poisonous drunk neat. It does not flow from a unique fount of wisdom that can quench all our existential thirsts. Perhaps that is why most of the authors in the series are not full-time philosophers. Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure.
What is being recovered from the ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy’s pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else. The challenge for those who champion philosophy’s usefulness is to show how it can fit in with the rest of life, not stand as master over it.
The Art of Living series rises to this challenge, up to a point. For instance, in Havi Carel’s moving and thoughtful book on illness, she describes how her scholarly work on death in Freud and Heidegger helped her deal with her life-threatening lung condition, lymphangioleiomyomatosis.
However, the main conclusions she draws seem to be almost identical to those that other people in her position come to without philosophy to help them through.
Carel’s book illustrates how the fact that philosophy can help us live better does not always mean it is uniquely positioned to do so. True, philosophy might lead you to draw certain conclusions more quickly and more clearly, but it could just as well muddy the waters and make you question whether you are right to, say, live more in the present.
If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake and not just for what it’s done for us lately. Perhaps that is why some other books in the series, although interesting and thought-provoking, draw lightly on philosophy, don’t tell us much about how to live or both.
The most important respect in which philosophy differs from — and is in some sense superior to — self-help is that it encourages us to think about the value of ends and not just the means to achieve them.
If you think philosophy is the source of unique wisdom, essential for living a good life, then The Art of Living series will disappoint. See it as a rich resource among many, one that contributes to our understanding of the good life, rather than prescribing what it should be, and suddenly these books seem much more fruitful. —